3 reasons to try machine translation

If you work in an international environment you get used to communicate with people coming from different countries and don’t realize your brain localizes automatically. But even if you know some languages, there are a lot you don’t understand at all…Few days ago I received an email written in ideograms marked automatically as spam. I couldn’t understand a word, so I pushed the magic bottom “translate”. Once I machine translated it I found out that the email was a message sent by my former Japanese housemate. She sent it from a non-localized social network that’s why part of the message was in ideograms. Without an MT application I would have just deleted it.

2. MT works also with a lingua franca

The result I got was in German because my email is localized in this language. Even if it is not my mother tongue the MT output was useful to me. There is this debate in the NLP Industry according to which MT research should focus on few language combinations to cover faster a larger quantity of speakers. On the one hand if you use MT just to understand what the text is about this could be a good approach, on the other hand you risk focusing only on money-makers languages. Join the debate by having a look at this blog post about Nicholas Ostler’s book “The Last Lingua Franca” http://www.capitatranslationinterpreting.com/mt-new-lingua-franca/.

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Published by Linda

I work in software development. I keep on writing from time to time People's Code to continue following some of my oldest passions: linguistics and language technologies. I'm Italian and I live in Luxembourg. Ah... the blog's name comes from my favorite definition of natural language: it is a shared code. It is not nice nor ugly, not simple nor difficult - we understand each other only because we share the same code and we (often) agree on it.
Ehm ho un altro blog in Italiano, ma è un segreto...
View all posts by Linda

I work in software development. I keep on writing from time to time People's Code to continue following some of my oldest passions: linguistics and language technologies. I'm Italian and I live in Luxembourg. Ah... the blog's name comes from my favorite definition of natural language: it is a shared code. It is not nice nor ugly, not simple nor difficult - we understand each other only because we share the same code and we (often) agree on it.
Ehm ho un altro blog in Italiano, ma è un segreto...

Terminology Coordination Unit

Growing up watching Italian TV stations meant that any time you watched a cartoon, TV series or a movie, the voices you hear are not real voices, and most of the time, the words you hear, don’t match the actor’s mouths. 148 total views, 10 views today